Flo Allen

Florence Virginia Wysinger Allen (b. 1913, California - d. 1997)
The figure who inspired the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
Flo Allen began nude figure modeling in 1933. She posed regularly at the San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the California College of Arts and Crafts; founding the San Francisco Models' Guild in 1945. Her strong figure inspired the most prominent painters, including Diego Rivera, David Park, Mark Rothko, Elmer Bischoff, Hassel Smith, Roy De Forest, Ralph Du Casse, Wayne Thiebaud, Eleanor Dickenson, Beth Van Heusen, Mark Adams, Richard Shaw, Nathan Oliveira, Karl Kasten, Glenn Wessels, Helen Salz, Art Grant, Joan Brown, Frank Lobdell and Bill Wiley.
Flo was legendary. Involved in the San Francisco literary and artistic community, and a civil rights activist, she wrote a regular column for the San Francisco Chronicle, Flo Sez.
She was a Muse and friend to many artists; ceremoniously honored often by the city during her life. Depicted and interpreted by the artist luminaries of the Bay Area; through them, Flo is a significant presence in any collection of Bay Area figurative art of that time.
After injuries from a traffic accident limited her mobility in 1987, Flo became the Model Coordinator at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where she also taught a Model Certification Workshop.
In 1995, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art acquired a collection of her personal effects and papers.
Flo's impact has not yet been adequately acknowledged in the broader literature on the San Francisco art scene. She never finished her biography. While she was a powerful and singular catalyst for civil rights and racial equality in every aspect of her life, and an inspiration for keeping the figure a central theme in art, her legacy remains obscured by a cult of personality surrounding the various artists she influenced, and by a reluctance by the black community to validate someone so steeped in the predominantly white art culture of that time, and who was in a sense objectified by that culture. But for her and those in her sphere of influence, color was simply the hue of a tube of paint, and not a defining personal characteristic. Flo was natural, confident, open, comfortable, and uninhibited--these were the aspects that had a transformative effect on all who studied her.
In 2007, Flo’s personal collection, including artworks from Roy De Forest, Adams, Roger Barr, Lundy Siegriest, Fred Fredden Goldberg, Fred Van Ormer, and others, along with her personal correspondences, portions of her unpublished biography, her family and personal photographs, was acquired mostly intact. The entire collection is in the process of being archived.
William Latham, 2009

Flo Allen